They both desired beauty; they had each stipulated for beauty before captivity could be acknowledged; and he beholding her very attractive comeliness, walked into the net, deeming the same a light thing to wear, and rather a finishing grace to his armoury; but she, a trained disciple of the conventional in social behaviour (as to the serious points and the extremer trifles), fluttered exceedingly; she knew not what she was doing, where her hand was, how she looked at him, how she drank in his looks on her.  Her woman’s eyes had no guard they had scarcely speculation.  She saw nothing in its passing, but everything backward, under haphazard flashes.  The sight of her hand disengaged told her it had been detained; a glance at the company reminded her that those were men and women who had been other than phantoms; recollections of the words she listened to, assented to, replied to, displayed the gulfs she had crossed.  And nevertheless her brain was as quick as his to press forward to pluck the themes which would demonstrate her mental vividness and at least indicate her force of character.  The splendour of the man quite extinguished, or over-brightened, her sense of personal charm; she set fire to her brain to shine intellectually, treating the tale of her fair face as a childish tale that might have a grain of truth in it, some truth, a very little, and that little nearly worthless, merely womanly, a poor charm of her sex.  The intellectual endowment was rarer:  still rarer the moral audacity.  O, to match this man’s embracing discursiveness! his ardour, his complacent energy, the full strong sound he brought out of all subjects!  He struck, and they rang.  There was a bell in everything for him; Nature gave out her cry, and significance was on all sides of the universe; no dead stuff, no longer any afflicting lumpishness.  His brain was vivifying light.  And how humane he was! how supremely tolerant!  Where she had really thought instead of flippantly tapping at the doors of thought, or crying vagrantly for an echo, his firm footing in the region thrilled her; and where she had felt deeper than fancifully, his wise tenderness overwhelmed.  Strange to consider:  with all his precious gifts, which must make the gift of life thrice dear to him, he was fearless.  Less by what he said than by divination she discerned that he knew not fear.  If for only that, she would have hung to him like his shadow.  She could have detected a brazen pretender.  A meaner mortal vaunting his great stores she would have written down coxcomb.  Her social training and natural perception raised her to a height to measure the bombastical and distinguish it from the eloquently lofty.  He spoke of himself, as the towering Alp speaks out at a first view, bidding that which he was be known.  Fearless, confident, able, he could not but be, as he believed himself, indomitable.  She who was this man’s mate would consequently wed his possessions, including courage.  Clotilde at once reached the conclusion of her having it in